Is it possible to pick up the pieces and rebuild a mountain?

CLINTWOOD, Va. – Jimmy “Popcorn” Adkins smiles as he hops the rocks in the middle of a roaring creek. After all, he built this mountain stream.

To the casual observer, the stream doesn’t look man-made, but Adkins has the drawings. He knows that the wetland once was a sediment pond, and that the 15 pools and riffles were engineered and built along 1,260 feet of stream bed.

In the first year, Adkins said, aquatic life migrated into the stream from natural waterways.

Adkins is the reclamation superintendent for Paramont Coal’s Black Bear No. 1 Surface Mine. For him, building a streambed is just part of the job.

Asked if it’s possible to put a mountain back, he and others who do it for a living say the answer is yes.

Amy Gail Fannon, extension agent for agriculture, natural resources and mined land restoration in Wise County, acknowledges that a mountain can’t be restored exactly as it was, nor can a forest.

But, she said, one can be grown in its place.

Reclamation researchers at the Powell River Project, where Fannon is site manager, don’t ask if – they ask how to use science to best restore the land.

Federal law requires one of two things after a site is surface mined: Create a “higher and better land use,” such as a road or commercial development site, or return the site to “approximate original contour.”

Once the soil is piled back up in the shape of a mountain, the experts recommend the forestry reclamation approach – preparing the ground and planting native trees – as the fastest way to return hardwood forests to former mine sites.

The soil doesn’t come back right away, Fannon said, but they’re working on it – and, generally speaking, the soil grows along with the trees.

Years later, it sometimes is difficult to tell the difference between a former mine site and the surrounding landscape.

“Last summer, my wife and I went up on Flag Rock, and we were looking out across the mountains, and I was looking for areas that I know had been stripped,” said Robby Robbins, immediate past chairman of the Wise County Board of Supervisors. “The vegetation had returned and the trees had grown up and it was a pretty sight.”

The earth, Robbins said, heals itself after a while, “and if you lay an eye-pleasing contour to everything after it’s been stripped, then once the vegetation is back, then you would never know that it had been stripped.”

Phillip Mullins, director of permitting and environmental affairs for Cumberland Resources, recalls a recent tour he gave to an official from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“I took her to an area that had been surface mined 25 years ago,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Can you see the surface mine?’ She said no. … It was very interesting that she couldn’t tell the difference.”

In some cases, Adkins said, coal companies actually put a mountain back better than they found it: They re-mine a site that was abandoned decades ago, reclaiming it in accordance with modern practices.

“In the re-mining process, you’re able to eliminate a lot of the old eyesores that were done prior to the ’77 [Surface Mining Control and Reclamation] act,” he said.

Adkins’ award-winning stream site at Black Bear – the first in Virginia, according to the company, a subsidiary of Abingdon, Va.-based Alpha Natural Resources – cost $110 per linear foot to build, he said.

Ted Pile, a spokesman for Alpha, said the company’s average mine reclamation project in Virginia costs more than $2.1 million.

But environmentalists are skeptical of anyone who claims they can measure up to Mother Nature.

“Every company has their PR reclamation site that they love to take decision-makers and the media to,” said Matt Wasson, director of programs for Appalachian Voices, a Boone, N.C.-based environmental and social justice group.

“While I’m sure that with enough effort, coal companies could do a pretty good job on one area or another, as a whole they are not even close. … It’s not even about what you see; it’s about what you can’t see. The pollution in these headwater streams is the 900-pound gorilla here.”

A Sierra Club report on the effect of mountaintop mining states that, “The alteration in topography persists forever and it will take centuries to reestablish the soils and forests that were historically present.”

To activists like Dave Cooper, who visited Bristol with his Mountaintop Removal Road Show in April, it’s cut and dry: “When you blow up a mountain, it’s gone forever.”

Mary Anne Hitt, deputy director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said it’s impossible to put a mountain back.

“And I think more importantly, you can’t put a stream back,” she said. “Even hundreds of years into the future, I don’t think the streams will ever recover, and I don’t think many stream ecologists believe they will.”

Aquatic ecologist Roberta Hylton, a project leader of the southwestern Virginia field office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said hundreds of years sounds like a fair estimate. But, she said, making an effort to restore the stream can help.

“Any scar on the land’s surface will heal over time,” Hylton said. “You can look at a stream and … it can look like any other stream that you would see, but the organisms know the difference. And trying to get the organisms to come back is the real question.”

Hylton said rebuilding a stream is difficult, and assessing recovery involves looking at the disturbed site but also upstream and downstream.

Still, she said, “Every area can probably tolerate some degree of mining and stream disturbance.”

There are all sorts of things to discuss when talking about mining, Hylton said, “and a lot of trade-offs you have to consider about what’s more valuable to society in the long run.”

For the industry, building streams – a task often required to replace those lost to mining – and making mountains green again has become an exercise in the possible.

Fannon said the best reclamation practices weren’t always used in the past, but federal regulators have learned along with the researchers – and the methods are continually improving.

Science is key to healing the mountains, Fannon said, not just from mining damage but from other scars of a past that hasn’t left them as pristine as environmentalists would have the public believe.

dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701